The SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award was established in 2013. The award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems, in the spirit and legacy of Dr. Paul Caspi’s work.

The SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award will be presented at most once per year, to the author of an outstanding dissertation in the area of Embedded Systems. The author of the winning dissertation will be invited to publish a dissertation summary in the ACM SIGBED Newsletter and to submit their work to the journal ACM TECS (Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems) for possible publication, after the normal peer-review process. The award will include an award certificate for the author and an honorarium of 2000 USD. A public citation for the award paper will be placed on the SIGBED web site.

• 2020: Daniel J. Fremont, UC Berkeley, USA, for his thesis Algorithmic Improvisation
• 2017: Guillaume Baudart, École normale supérieure, Paris, for his thesis A Synchronous Approach to Quasi-Periodic Systems
• 2016: Santiago Pagani, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, for his thesis Power, Energy, and Thermal Management for Clustered Manycores
• 2015: Marco Zimmerling, ETH Zurich, for his thesis End-to-end Predictability and Efficiency in Low-power Wireless Networks
• 2014: Arjun Radhakrishna, IST Austria, for his thesis Quantitative Specifications for Verification and Synthesis
• 2013: Bernard Blackham, University of New South Wales, NICTA, for his thesis Towards Verified Microkernels for Real-Time Mixed-Criticality Systems

The SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award is given for an outstanding doctoral dissertation dated within one year preceding the nomination due date. A selection committee and its chair will be chosen by the current SIGBED Executive Committee. A member of the current SIGBED Executive Committee will be one of the selection committee members. The committee chair shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary. Dissertations supervised by a selection committee member are ineligible to be nominated. For purposes of continuity, committee members may remain on the committee for up to three years. The selection committee shall be no less than three persons in size.

Selection Committee for the 2019-2020 Award (further members may be added)

• Chris Gill (Chair)
• Samarjit Chakraborty
• Sharon Hu
• Tulika Mitra
• Isabelle Puaut
• Lothar Thiele

Nominations will be solicited annually via major mailing lists and web forums. Additionally, dissertation advisers in each eligible year also may be contacted for solicitation of award nominations.

A nomination should consist of an email to the committee chair (Chris Gill at cdgill@wustl.edu) with subject line “Paul Caspi Award Nomination” and the following items in the body of the e-mail:

• Name, address, phone number, and email address of the person making the nomination (the nominator).
• Name, address, phone number, and email address of the candidate for whom an award is recommended (the nominee).
• Name, address, phone number, and email address of anyone else who is providing a statement in support of the nomination.

The following additional documents should be attached to that email:

• A short statement (200-500 words) explaining why the nominee deserves the award.
• Supporting statements (each 200-500 words) from up to two persons in addition to the nominator.
• The nominated dissertation in an English language version.
• A list of the nominee’s publications that correspond to chapters in the nominated dissertation.
• The CV of the nominee.

The selection committee will make a recommendation on the winner of the award to the SIGBED Executive Committee, which will approve and announce the final winner if one is selected that year. SIGBED Executive Committee members who have conflicts of interest with any nominee will be excluded from the approval process. The primary selection criterion will be the quality of the candidate’s work, with the aim to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations. The selection committee may choose to issue no award in a given year. The award may not be given to multiple recipients in the same year.

Nominations for 2019-2020 dissertations are due on January 15, 2020, and thereafter on January 15 in each subsequent year. In order to ensure full consideration by the committee, please send your nomination to the committee chair by the deadline, though nominations received after the deadline may be considered until the committee has reached its decision.